Tinctorial Glossary

Exploring terms from the art, history, and science of color

Cast your mind back. Imagine a time when color was not bought, but concocted. When color had a heft, scent, taste, texture, and carried a weight of labor. When it existed in a taught web of multivalent connections to nature, culture, class, artisanry, alchemy, and the divine. 

Beginning in the mid-1800s, artists and craftspeople enjoyed the bounty of an ever-proliferating rainbow of petroleum-derived synthetic colors. They also experienced immense pressure from the forces of economics and fashion to transition from traditional dyes and pigments to new commercial products. In the process, much heritage color knowledge was lost. 

This time-traveling tinctorial glossary is a poetical-lexical bridge spanning that enormous gap in knowledge. Drawing from the historical written record and my own studio experience, it aims to repopulate our understanding with forgotten terms and concepts, reminding artists of the multivalent connections of each color on our palette, underfoot, and growing outside our studio door.

-Natalie

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